Last March, two Comair airline employees at Orlando International Airport in Florida were arrested after using their airport security badges to smuggle weapons and drugs onto a passenger flight headed for San Juan, Puerto Rico. The weapons and drugs amounted to 13 guns, an assault rifle and 8 pounds of marijuana transported in a carry-on duffel bag. As a result of this security gap being exposed, the TSA is now running a pilot program, out of Logan Airport in Boston, to screen all airport employees. From Donna Goodison for the Boston Herald:

All 14,000 Logan International Airport workers could be subjected to daily and repeated security screenings for weapons, drugs and other contraband if a new test program proves it's feasible.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration this month started setting up special checkpoints to screen employees - from baggage handlers to mechanics to truck drivers - headed into secure, non-passenger areas throughout the airport. Employees accessing secure passenger areas will continue to be screened through regular passenger security checkpoints.

In this pilot program, the TSA's after-the-fact approach to airline security is made obvious. It took the embarrassment — and public outcry — of weapons getting onto airplanes to get the TSA to take action on something that TSA's own employees have repeatedly sounded the alarm about. Just three weeks before the incident in Orlando, two Las Vegas Air Marshals (one current, one former) appeared on an ABC News segment exposing the same security hole. TSA took no action and instead issued a terse statement to ABC about the adequacy of their policies, citing "background checks" as a safeguard against rouge employees.

Earlier: When Airport Employees Join Drug and Gun Cartels.

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Hundreds of secret documents detailing aviation security procedures and marked "Sensitive Security Information" (SSI) were found by a teenager in a dumpster near the Orlando International Airport. The documents were apparently tossed there by officials who work for the Transportation Security (TSA). The Washington Times has more details.

[T]he unnamed teenager found "three-ring binders and an 11-inch-by-17-inch airport layout plan set in a trash dumpster," according to an Orlando Police Department report, filed by Detective Jay Mack.

"The documents, part of an Orlando International Airport 20-year-growth master plan, were labeled 'Sensitive Security Information that should not be released without a need to know,' " the report said.

"A former deputy director of the State Department's counterterrorism office called the master plan update an excellent document for terrorists planning an attack," the report said.
 

This from the same government organization that is tasked with keeping terrorists off airplanes.

And the same organization that fired Federal Air Marshal Robert MacLean for releasing information that the TSA labeled SSI — four years after it was already sent out over unsecured phone lines.

And the same agency that recently lost a hard drive with 100,000 Homeland Security agents personal information including social security numbers and bank information.

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Patterico's Pontifications is running an excellent piece today entitled, Federal Air Marshal Goes on The Record Stating His Opinion That Flight 327 Was A Dry Run. Patterico tracked down current Federal Air Marshal, P. Jeffrey Black, quoted in the Washington Times article, Security Flaws Confirmed on Flight 327, and publishes a fascinating letter by Air Marshal Black. Here's an excerpt: 

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The Department of Homeland Security has declassified the Inspector General's report on Northwest Flight 327 — a flight which I was a passenger on back in June of 2004. It took the US government two years and eleven months to confirm what I have been writing since the flight landed — in my 28-part series for WomensWallStreet.com and in Terror in The Skies, Why 9/11 Could Happen Again (Spence 2005) i.e:

• The flight was a dry run for a future terrorist attack involving planes.   
• The Federal Air Marshal Service grossly mishandled what happened during the flight.   
• The Syrians terrified flight crew and passengers.   
• The Federal Air Marshal Service grossly mismanaged what happened after the flight landed in Los Angeles.
• The Federal Air Marshal Service attempted to cover up their egregious incompetence by issuing false statements and misleading the public about the severity of what happened on the flight.

Audrey Hudson of The Washington Times has a Page One article today, Sunday, "More Details on Flight 327 Released." According to the paper, Hudson will report further on the DHS declassified investigation on Wednesday.

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) obtained a copy of the fifty-one page report through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) which you can download from their website.

Ironic note: DHS now refers to the group as a "band" (in quotes) because the Syrians were not a band — that was their cover. The declassified DHS report also confirms what I reported last month: that the Syrians from Flight 327 were involved in an earlier dry run — on January 28, 2004. The FBI had flagged this dry run into their incident base six months before Northwest 327 took flight. 

The Washington Times: Blogs a buzz over Flight 327.

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Twenty-two days and counting on an answer back from the Department of Homeland Security as to whether or not they’ll send me a single copy of one of the 200,000 DVDs which DHS sent out to federal employees — the one that counsels federal folks how to deal with Muslims when encountering them in the field. I’ve got Finish blood running through my veins (my grandfather was from Finland) and I’m still hoping for DHS to produce, film, edit and distribute its refresher course on how to deal with Fins on the phone; maybe that would prompt a quicker response from them to me.

In the meantime, this just in from an Air Marshal. It seems there is more “Arab and Muslim” sensitivity training programs on the horizon.

There’s more; you can use your imagination. I would not want to post anything that might tip the terrorists’ hands.

Audrey Hudson of The Washington Times got her hands on a copy of the DVD. Here’s what she had to say about it :

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My WomensWallStreet.com article today, about the Federal Flight Deck Officers (FFDO) program, is creating a controversy I did not expect. Pilots are sending me emails of support; air marshals are sending me angry ones. This newest installment called, “Annie Get Your Gun” is part of an ongoing series I write for the webzine about aviation security. In this article, I argue that the TSA is responsible for mismanaging the FFDO program.

I also make a case for the fact that TSA is responsible for manipulating media outlets in spinning the FFDO program so it seems controversial when it’s not:

While pilots are discussing the “spot on” nature of the article on message boards, I’m getting flooded by emails from angry air marshals who seem to think my support of the FFDO program means my betrayal of the air marshals, which is absurd. The air marshal program is an excellent and necessary layer of aviation security. But how the program is managed (ie: mismanaged) and by whom, continues to be another story.

Hands down, it’s the bureaucratic bloat I object to — and I think air marshals and citizens alike should object to this too. Why it costs US taxpayers $350,000 to put an air marshal in the air — a figure that has more than tripled (from $109,000) in less than five years — needs to be made clear by the TSA. (air marshal salaries, that average approximately $75,000 a year, haven’t changed.)

I suggest the angry rank-and-file air marshals start asking these questions of their bosses in their field offices — their SACs [Special Agent-in-Charge] and their ASACs [Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge] and their ATSACs [Assistant to the Special Agent-in-Charge] — all of whom are making six figure salaries and of whom there are so many. Perhaps they could explain the ballooning budgets and the unbridled secrecy programs.

Secret government budgets are never a good sign for democracy. Email your Congressperson and demand the Federal Air Marshal Service budget breakdowns — currently classified — be made transparent.

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Thanks to government transparency, the FY 2006 salaries of all Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees has been made public. The average salary was $56,334 per employee. The DHS office with the highest-average salary was US-VISIT — with its 115 employees averaging $151,197 a piece. The TSA took home the lowest-average salary award — with its 51,275 employees averaging $36,387 a piece.

Christian Beckner of Homeland Security Watch determined the averages based on raw data he analyzed from a 2,933 page document now available online. Beckner writes:

That’s odd. Thanks to government secrecy, the statistics on the Federal Air Marshal Service — and the Federal Air Marshal Service alone — have been classified. What this means is that oversight committees do not have access to how many air marshals have left the beleaguered service, nor are they allowed to know what’s happened to the money that was once earmarked for those air marshals’ salaries. Those positions, according to a series of interviews conducted with former Special Agent-in-Charge (SAC) of the Atlanta field office, Don Strange, have not been back filled — and number as high as twenty-five percent.

Today’s Wall Street Journal article on the Federal Air Marshal Service offers headquarters’ version of those numbers (numbers they — and only they — are allowed to view):

But what if Don Strange is right? A twenty-five percent employee loss in a law enforcement agency is hardly minimal, particularly if those positions remain unfilled. No wonder the Federal Air Marshal Service wants to keep its budget secret. And why the special, secretive treatment? Even nuclear budgets and budgets to protect the President are made public.

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